Electric computer games, Beast Mastery hunting and obscure references

It looks like we’ve got all the information we’re likely to see for some time on the Great Hunter Change. Reactions from around the community are pretty varied, from welcoming enthusiasm to shocked anger. Since WoW is as much a game of people as it is things, stats and classes, I’ve summarised here some of the views of other hunter-bloggers.

Pike of Aspect of the Hare says she has no opinion. Honestly, I think she might have the right attitude there. It’s probably a year in the future and there’s a good chance everything will have changed dramatically by the time it actually hits. Still, it’s fun to speculate!
As pointed out below, she most certainly IS looking forward to the Goblins. As are all individuals of sound mind. I dread to think just how many hunters she’ll have on her account after Cataclysm hits!

Rilgon of Stabilised Effort Scope is excited and terrified. This is much the same as my initial reaction: Unmitigated excitement at a lot of the cataclysm announcements, followed by shock, disbelief and fear at the hunter changes. I’m going to be optimistic for now, but Rilgon makes fair points about the degree to which it could ruin the class. He talks also about the engineering changes: I like the idea of more fun things and devices that malfunction horribly, but engineers do need to remain competitive at top levels and there was no mention of that. Since engineering is more fun than other professions I don’t see any reason why we’d need to be the best, but competitive at least. Finally he considers archaeology as a high-end raider. For me – a pretty infrequent raider although not entirely through my own choice – it sounds great. For him, one more thing he has to do to retain his raid slot.

Windpaw of Shock and Paw talks about rerolling. The completely redesigned old world, new levelling experience and new class quests do seem to encourage rerolling. I doubt it’ll affect my choice of main character, but I’ll be keeping a few character slots clear for Cataclysm. Just for the starting experience, I’ll have a worgen and goblin something. If it wasn’t so far in the future, I’d scrap my druid right now and reroll him in the new world. I love the sound of ‘more class quests’, I want a catform quest for druids and a ‘here’s how to kite since the levelling experience totally doesn’t teach you how to do this’ quest for hunters!

The Hunter’s Mark makes no mention of anything to do with Cataclysm at all, in any way. Which is surprising but fair enough, as it hasn’t actually happened yet…

BigRedRhino is concerned that the stat overhaul will ‘unintentionally’ screw hunter-pet tanking. This is a very real concern that I hadn’t considered. It’d be nice if we were able to specifically talent FOR tanky pets now that the talent trees are being adjusted – while Blizzard have said very, very little about pet-tanking, what is the purpose of tenacity pets otherwise? AoE soloing? An entire class of pet just exclusively for that? I’m hopeful that Blizzard will – if not supporting it or making it easy – still permit hunters with tenacity pets to tank to a reasonable extent. Time will tell.

Mania (of Mania’s Arcania), the Supreme Pet Authority has filtered out and posted the relevant bits about hunter pets. I’ve linked to her day two roundup, as that’s where most of the pet-type news appeared. I’m looking forward to pets not being killed by boss AoEs and really looking forward to seeing what Blizzard means by ‘enhanced pet control’…

Aaand that’s it for all the weblogs in the hunting community that I actually read. I’m sure there’s much more out there that I’ve missed, however, so please feel free to notify me if there’s some interesting article or series that I’ve missed out on!
I don’t currently have any more Cataclysm articles in the pipeline, so I’ll probably get back to posting about present-day Azeroth now. It’s certainly interesting to look to the future, but there’s plenty still to do here and now! Arthas awaits…